Difficulty seeing through transparency on images as planes
Alpha Blend and Alpha Hashed are only used for Eevee, those settings don't matter for Cycles.
In Cycles, Alpha transparency is shown different in Rendered View and Material Preview. Alpha transparency (like from an alpha channel or the Transparent Shader) is shown in black for Alpha = 0 in Material Preview or not shown as transparent at all when Alpha &gt; 0, it's only transparent in Rendered View.
When the transparent parts are shown black in Rendered View then you maybe have to go to Render Settings &gt; Light Paths &gt; Max Bounces and set a higher value for Transparency, this is for materials with transparency set in the Alpha channel of the Principled BSDF for example or where the textures have Alpha maps to mix in with a Transparent Shader or volumes like a Smoke Domain etc. The Transparency Bounces can be set independently without having to change other bounce values.
If you instead have a Glass BSDF or other transmissive material like using the Transmission channel in the Principled BSDF, then you have to set a higher bounce value for Transmission in Light Paths, and maybe even in Total if it's too low. Because unlike Transparency, the Transmission (and other) bounces are dependent on the Total value. Setting Transmission to 16 with a Total set to 4 will result in having Transmission clipped to 4 as well, so the Total value should cover the highest value of the individual bounces (except for Transparency).

PS: I've included the Smoke Domain as example for Transparency bounces because, apart from having a bounce value for Volume here as well, low transparency bounces are what sometimes causes smoke to have ugly black artifacts, which I've seen a lot in smoke tutorials but tutors tend to call it a bug or clipping by the Adaptive Domain.